Post View Conversions
Background
Post View Conversions
When a Line Item wins an auction and renders on the page, the buyer may be interested in knowing whether the user who sees the ad interacts with it (things like clicks, views, video plays), and further may want to know whether the user then "converted", meaning performed some desired action, after seeing the add. The desired action might be spending money on the advertisers product, signing up for an account, etc. This is a basic feature offered by most DSPs.
DSPs generally offer tracking of two paths of conversions post auction: post click, meaning the user clicks the ad to go to the purchase page and then buys; and post view, in which the user sees the ad and then buys later, but w/o necessarily clicking.
Post click actions can be tracked with an ID based integration between the impression page and click landing page. Post view has historically been done using a cookie - since the cookie (3PC) was the same on the impression page and the conversion page, the two events could be joined by that ID and typically some other pieces of metadata such as a pixel ID.
With cookies becoming partitioned by TLD, the current method for tracking post view conversions will no longer work.
Contextual vs Private Wins
In a Privacy Sandbox world we have two classes of auction outcomes which impact how we can both render creatives but also use and send information back to our servers:
- Contextual Win: means the win comes from the contextual auction and we can access any information returned with the BidResponse for rendering the creative and sending data back to our servers, or putting into local storage.
- Private Win: the win comes from the invocation of navigator.runAdAuction(), which means we have more limited access to data created during the auction, both for rendering and for sending data back to our servers.
So in the case of a contextual win it is "easy" for us to encode information that we can then access immediately for local storage; in the case of a private win we need a few more patterns to get data into the iFrame for rendering and/or reporting outcomes, including in local storage.